Pitcairn and Cape Verde are 20-30 % more power efficient than anything Nvidia can muster, and 7950/ 7970 are a few percents less/ more power efficient than the GTX 680, plus it has more compute oomph. It would be foolish to dump AMD, especially in cooling constrained platforms like the imac and MBP.

I’d like to see nvidia support again, I’m stuck with using either a GTX285 or Quadro with Adobe’s CUDA/Mercury enabled apps. Makes a huge difference in my workflow and this my 285 & Quadro4000 are getting old compared to the current crop of cards.

Scalar, why don’t you get yourself a GTX570 ? Plug in and install the latest nvidia drivers and cuda .. and you’re ready to go. Even a GTX580 might work, you’d have to sort out the issue with the power though. (don’t go above 300W on all PCIe cards and need 6+8pin pcie power connectors)

First do a backup. Whether we want to admit it or not, all hard drives fail, and furthermore, hard drives never crash at a convenient time. So before we start doing anything, let?s back up your hard drive. I use an external hard drive connected to a USB2 port and I try to back up at least once a month. I only back up my critical data, which is essentially the My Documents directory and my email folders. The entire process takes about half an hour.

Delete your junk mail folder.

Did you know that junk mail slows down system performance? Every time you receive an email (good or bad), that email is written to your hard drive. Not such a big deal, but 90% of the email that I receive is actually spam, and it just eats up hard drive space, and further fragments my hard drive. Usually before deleting my junk mail folder, I try to take a quick skim to see if it accidentally classified a good email as bad (the dreaded false positive). In the course of a month, I usually find about 1-2 good emails marked as spam.

Empty the recycle bin.

When you delete a file, it really is still on your hard drive in the recycle bin, out of sight, out of mind. Although it is handy to be able to find an accidentally deleted file, over time, gigabytes and gigabytes of junk accumulate and should be erased . Note: this also poses a security risk because it makes it easy for people to find the things you really wanted permanently deleted. At PC Pitstop, we have seen systems with more than 50GB?s sitting in the Recycle Bin.

Clear out temporary system files.

What happens when you open an attachment from your favorite email client, or when Word is doing an auto save on your new novel? All of your data and much more is being stored in temporary system files throughout your hard drive. Just like your recycle bin, it can be handy, but over the course of days and weeks, it only serves to clog up your hard drive. You should reclaim all of that space, and sometimes it can be a lot!

Clear out internet cache.

Whether your browser is FireFox or Internet Explorer, both have an internet cache with tons of information about each and every web site you visit. In the short term, these caches speed up web browsing, but over the medium term, if you browse the web a lot (who doesn?t?), then these caches get big and unwieldy. At PC Pitstop, we actually have seen more than one PC with an internet cache of more than 100GB.

Uninstall any unused programs.

It has happened to all of us, we download 4-5 software applications, looking for a solution to a particular problem. That?s great, but your hard drive now has quite a few applications that you never intend to use. Or perhaps, you downloaded/bought something a long time ago, but you no longer have a use for it. If this is the case, then uninstall any and all programs that you no longer have a use for. There are three big reasons why you should uninstall programs you don?t use. 1) Programs take up hard drive space, 2) Many programs install background processes that use up processor cycles and memory even if you are not using them, and 3) All programs create entries into your Windows Registry. By uninstalling unwanted programs, you are also uninstalling unwanted registry entries.